Pages

Thursday, January 1, 2015

To close out 2014 I watched 27 films, which left me just shy of 400 for the year. Not much else to note this month. Work was stressful and we have been busily getting bits and pieces ready for the wedding in March. We visited family for Christmas and escaped Sydney for Melbourne to see in 2015.
I will also take this opportunity to inform everyone that this will be my final post on The Film Emporium. I have not had the time to commit to this site as much as I used to, and have been contributing to Graffiti With PunctuationandAn Online Universeover the last two years. The latter most recently, and continuing in the future. I am absolutely addicted to film and love writing so I will not be stopping. Rather I will be dedicating my time to just contributing reviews and articles, and hopefully freeing up some time for TV, novels and other passions.

I wish to thank everyone for supporting The Film Emporium over the years. It has been about five years now since I started it, how fast that time has gone. There are 1600+ posts on the site and 600+ reviews. Thank you to everyone who has shared an article, left a comment, linked to the site from their own page, or voted for me in the LAMMY awards (I once won 'Most Prolific Blogger'). There are many people I have to thank for making The Film Emporium the site it is today, and I hope you all know who you are. Many of you are dear friends I see regularly today, and many others I had the pleasure of meeting this year while I was overseas.
Now, here is what I saw in December 2014:

-------- Essential Viewing --------

Singin' in the Rain (Stanley Donen, 1952) - First time. I get it now, guys. Wonderful.

Virunga (Orlando Von Einsiedel, 2014) - Conservation,
capitalism and civil war collide in this vital, thrilling historical
document of a desperate attempt to protect Virunga National Park and the
endangered mountain gorillas within. Some of the footage in this
film is the result of people risking their lives - a journalist meets
with one of the oil company's chief executives, and covertly films their
meeting - with the filmmakers also placing themselves in the thick of
the conflict for the extraordinary content. I was floored by this documentary.

The One I Love(Charlie McDowell, 2014) - I have been thinking about this one a lot, even though I snuck it in just before the busy Christmas period. I am a big fan of Duplass and Moss, and what they bring to the film is every bit as commendable as the clever execution of this interesting idea that provokes a lot of consideration about communication in relationships, how much weight we place in who we desire our partners to be (and how different that is from who they actually are/have become) and notions of adultery. Just roll with it. Very funny, but it takes a dark and disturbing turn.